A black man with a knife, a white cop with a gun

And a bird's-eye view from my window.

A Black man is on his knees, at left, and a white officer holds his gun low, at right. As seen through my blurred screen window.

My whole body is shaking.

There is shouting outside my ground-floor Brooklyn apartment. From my window, I see a young white cop I know training a gun on a Black man, who is yelling from just a few feet away. The officer is not in uniform but has hung his gold badge around his neck. The gun — a department-issue Glock 19 — is angled slightly down, and the cop is backing up slowly while telling the man to “get away from the knife” and “get on the ground.”